FSFE needs your donation to work for Free Software in 2016

on: 2015-12-16

Lots of people and companies in our society benefit from
Free Software. The Free Software Foundation Europe is empowering people to
control technology since 2001. To make a difference in our work, we aim at
140.000€ in donations until 31 January, of which we already received
60.000€.

As a company, please support us with a
donation. You can become gold donor for 1000€/month, silver donor for
200€/month, or bronze donor for 40€/month.

Our donors recently enabled us to achieve the following successes:

We closed our six-year-long PDFreaders campaign after convincing 1125
public administrations to remove advertisement for proprietary software from
their websites.

We helped end compulsory routers in Germany with a law that ensures users
have the freedom to choose their own Free Software router. This should set an
example across Europe, and we will support similar legislation wherever
needed.

We are active in the EU policy: our evaluation of the Digital Single Market
Strategy for the European Commission was well received and we expect other EU
institutions to follow our recommendations.

On average we send out one promotional package per day. Our supporters use
the multilingual material to inform more people about software freedom in their
companies, universities, schools, in libraries and cafes, or at information
booths.

From next year on we want to focus on pushing our demand for all
publicly funded software to be published as Free Software, and for
everyone's right to experiment with their own hard- and
software.

To achieve those goals we will:

provide training to our campaign volunteers in order to increase their
effectiveness, and equip them with a greater diversity of promotional material;
and

initiate coordination between Free Software groups who are active on policy
issues in the EU.

In addition we will maintain our ongoing efforts to abolish barriers to
software freedom and encourage people to use and develop Free Software.
One essential activity remains guiding companies to move to Free
Software by educating their legal departments to understand Free
Software licences.

Still, there are growing challenges: opaque international treaties and
complex policy processes demand careful approaches to address software
freedom effectively. We need to be able to keep up with such
developments.